Journal of Student Research 2015

47

The World May Never Know: Unwrapping the Mystery of the Tootsie Pop

The World May Never Know Unwrapping the Mystery of the Tootsie Pop

Tyler T. Schmidt Junior, Professional Communications and Emerging Media

ABSTRACT There is a surprising amount of research available on the number of licks it takes to reach the center of a Tootsie Pop (Zyra, 1996; Waks man, 2009; Tootsie Roll Industries, n.d.). Yet, many of these studies have a large amount of inconsistency in the number of licks it actually takes. I conducted research in order to mathematically find how many licks it takes to dissolve each millimeter of a Tootsie Pop. With that number, I determined that two different methods of licking resulted in 124.74 and 39.91 licks per millimeter to reach the center. Combining the more effec tive 39.91 licks per millimeter method with the average width of a Tootsie Pop, 8 millimeters, I concluded that the average number of licks to reach the center of a Tootsie Pop is 319.28. Discovering that Heid (2013) had licked the thicker side of the Tootsie Pops during his research I adjusted the average width from 8 to 10.5 millimeters. Using this final piece of data I determined that my new average number of licks, 419, confirmed Heid’s average of 417 licks. question of them all is, “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” This question has been a popular advertising campaign of Tootsie Roll Industries since 1970, and a consistent answer hasn’t been discovered (Tootsie Roll Industries, n.d.). The literature I found on this subject consisted of Internet-based sources found through a Goo gle search, as there are very few useful scholarly sources. The literature focused on licking tests, which were performed to find an exact number of licks required to reach the Tootsie Roll center. These tests produced inconsistent results (Zyra, 1996; Waksman, 2009; Heid, 2013; Tootsie Roll Industries, n.d.). Zyra (1996) conducted an experiment using students attending Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Twenty-two trials were carried out in which each participant would lick one or both sides until the Tootsie Key Words: Tootsie Pop, LPmm, Heid, licks, Tootsie Roll, Miley Literature Review Life is filled with many great mysteries, but perhaps the greatest